As Covid Vaccination Advances, New Conspiracy Theories Emerge On The Web

Jeremy Tordjman / AFP

The anti-vaccine and refusal versions of the pandemic take different forms as new phases of the disease and treatments develop.

Social media is buzzing these days with a conspiracy theory that accuses vaccines of creating more dangerous variants of covid-19 and that vaccinated people carry “bacteriological time bombs,” hypotheses refuted by immunologists.

This new anti-vaccine attack, which spreads from conspiracy stories, comes with a supposed scientific side, seeking to heighten fear and mistrust, as variants gain ground around the world, like the British in Europe and the Brazilians in America. South.

This false information is presented in different ways: some, published on Facebook and shared more than a thousand times in a few days, have a very direct style: “Vaccinated people walk bacteriological time bombs and a THREAT to society,” shouts one. message accompanied by an image of sticks of dynamite connected to a detonator.

“Vaccinated people (…) are those who are more likely to infect other people with super-strains”, defends an article.

Also on Facebook, a more formal letter from a Belgian scientist, Geert Vanden Bossche, drew a good handful of followers claiming that the vaccination could cause a massive “adaptive immune leak”, which would eventually strengthen the virus.

“The more we use these vaccines to immunize people in the midst of a pandemic, the greater the infectious capacity of the virus”, according to this scientist.

In short, the cure for COVID-19 is worse than the disease, according to these theories.

But these publications are based on a contradiction, since vaccines must be inoculated as soon as possible to limit the risk of multiplication of dangerous variants, explained the immunologists interviewed by AFP.

The mutations

Like any virus, SARS-CoV-2 continually mutates due to genetic copying errors that occur during its replication. Many of these mutations are harmless, but some of them can make the virus more infectious, resistant to antibodies, and even more deadly.

Natural selection causes the most useful mutations for the virus to survive over time. Therefore, the longer the vaccination is delayed, the greater the risk of the virus being boosted against antibodies, natural or generated with immunizers, is great.

“The risks of not carrying out a vigorous vaccination campaign is that the variants are installed” on the territory, recently estimated the virologist Stéphanie Haim-Boukobza.

“The more (the virus) circulates, the more opportunities it will have to find solutions to vaccination and immunity,” according to epidemiologist Pascal Crepey. “We must leave as little time as possible,” he reiterates.

“If you put a small amount of insecticide in an anthill each day, it will kill a number of ants, while some will become very resistant to the insecticide. On the other hand, if you put a lot of blows, the mutants will not be able to survive, ”summarizes Michel Moutschen, professor of immunopathology.

“What we fear is that the variants will manage to slip through the filter exerted by vaccination”, explains Vincent Maréchal, professor of virology at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris. But just because vaccines “let the variants go” doesn’t mean they’re made at all, as conspiracy theory argues, he insists.

The British variant appeared about two months before the UK vaccination campaign began in December. The Brazilian was detected in the Manaus region where the virus was circulating without obstacles.

“Covid-19 vaccines don’t make variants.” “The risk is rather that they are not sufficiently effective to prevent these mutations”, explains Olivier Schwartz, head of the Virus and Immunity unit at the Institut Pasteur in France.